TechBio: Latest Trends 🛸
TechBio: Latest Trends 🛸
MetaphysicalCells: A newsletter about Science, Technology and AI Drug Discovery
“In biology, nothing is clear, everything is too complicated, everything is a mess, and just when you think you understand something, you peel off a layer and find deeper complications beneath. Nature is anything but simple.”
By Richard Preston, The Hot Zone: The Terrifying True Story of the Origins of the Ebola Virus
NEWS
🐱 The Simons Foundation’s Life Sciences division invites applications for postdoctoral fellowships to support candidates who intend to pursue a career in basic research on fundamental problems in marine microbial ecology with an emphasis on understanding the role of microorganisms in shaping ocean processes and vice versa.
🐯 Nucleate is thrilled to announce the renewal of its strategic partnership with Alnylam Pharmaceuticals for the third consecutive year.
🦁 Edwin Moses, the former CEO of one of the most successful platform companies in Europe, Ablynx now part of Sanofi, talks about how he feels 5 years after the exit from Ablynx and his lessons. 💎 ABOUT THE SPEAKER Edwin Moses is Chairman of Achilles Thx (cell therapy for solid tumors), Avantium (bioplastics) and LabGenius (AI biotech).
🐶 Algorae closes in on AI drug discovery platform launch (Algorae Pharmaceuticals).
🐺 Elsevier and Iktos partner to deliver an AI-driven synthetic chemistry platform for drug discovery (Iktos).
🐻❄️ Michael Parker, Principal AI Scientist at Optibrium, discusses generative chemistry and other exciting AI applications in small molecule drug discovery: AI: Hype or High Performance?
🐼 Tanya Cashorali, CEO of TCB Analytics, in upcoming keynote at ShinyConf. Explore real-world AI use cases, from drug discovery to GPT-enhanced coding. Register.
Cradle Bio 🧫🖥️
Cradle Bio is a Dutch-Swiss startup that exited stealth in 2022 and is using generative AI for protein engineering—enzymes, vaccines, peptides and antibodies—and cell factories. Cradle’s design platform makes it easy for everyone to start building products with biology instead of oil or animals, leveraging generative ML models to transform how biologists design and optimize proteins. The company has already onboarded nine leading industry partners in the past years including Janssen Research & Development, Novozymes and Twist Bioscience.
In February 2024, Stef van Grieken, CEO and co-founder of Cradle, announced that Cradle has partnered with Ginkgo Bioworks, the leading platform for cell programming and biosecurity, as part of the creation of the Ginkgo Technology Network. The other co-founder of Cradle is Elise de Reus.
Cradle has raised so far a total of $33M, backed by Index Ventures and Kindred Capital:
Index Ventures, is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London. Neil Rimer co-founded Index Ventures in 1996 and served as a Partner for more than 25 years, until 2021, when Neil stepped down as an active Partner. Since then, he has continued to manage his portion of the portfolio and makes himself available to support his partners and the firm he helped build. The other two co-founders are David Rimer and Giuseppe Zocco. Giuseppe is also co-founder and senior advisor at Medicxi, a European investment firm focused on the life sciences sector established in 2016 by the former Index Ventures life sciences team.
At Index Ventures, they invest also into:
Kindred Capital (London, 2015) has a new model for Venture Capital where every founder they back becomes a co-owner of the fund. Apart Cradle, they invest in:
Shift Bioscience in the UK has identified drug targets for safe cellular rejuvenation and treatment of age-linked diseases by the application of ML 'driver' clocks to cellular reprogramming. The company was founded in 2017 by Daniel Ives and Brendan Swain. Leonard Wossnig, CTO in LabGenius and an AI expert, is an Advisor at Shift Bioscience.
Giant Ventures 🧞
Giant Ventures founded in 2019 is a multi-stage, thesis driven firm seeking systemic change across three themes: Climate, Health and Inclusive Capitalism. Giant invests at Pre-Seed, Seed and Series B in Europe and the US, and they are based in London, New York, California, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Co-Founder & Managing Partner is Cameron McLain while Tommy Stadlen is Co-Founder & General Partner.
On January 31, 2024, Giant Ventures, the VC with a knack for backing serial founders, launched $250M in new funds. LPs include Richard Branson, while former UK foreign secretary David Miliband is an advisory board member.
They invest in “Giants” like:
Calm is a software company based in San Francisco, California that produces meditation products, including guided meditations and Sleep Stories on its subscription-based app.
Doccla is Europe’s leading virtual hospital.
TerraDepth is building fleets of robots for ocean data.
Synonym Bio is developing infrastructure for the bioeconomy.
Invert Bio is a new standard for data management, analytics and modeling in bioprocessing.
Are you planning to move to Japan to work at a new AI Drug Discovery startup?
Llanai: Learn a language by speaking it 🗣️! On-Demand AI Chat with InstantFeedback!
by
Entourage 💰
Showpad co-founder Pieterjan Bouten just launched Entourage, a venture studio and $30M early-stage VC fund. After a year of building in stealth, Entourage aims to fund new and upcoming B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies in Europe.
AI startup Perplexity is targeting Google's search market 🎯
On this newsletter AI Tools for Summarizing AI Research, by AI Supremacy (by Michael Spencer, is an amateur futurist with 210,000 LinkedIn followers and a 2-time LinkedIn Top Voice) and by
, Perplexity was highlighted:“as an LLM-based search engine that finds information on the internet, summarizes it, and links to resources. Its dedicated “Academic” focus helps researchers find AI research papers that contain important advancements in the field of AI.”
On March 5, 2024, it was announced that AI Search Startup Perplexity Set to Double Valuation to $1 Billion.
Insilico Medicine 🎩
Insilico Medicine (Hong Kong, 2014), founded by Alex (Aleksandrs Zavoronkovs) Zhavoronkov, is a company that doesn’t need introductions. The legendary Insilico Medicine, together with Exscientia, Atomwise, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Iktos and many more, are considered the global leaders in the AI drug discovery space, something like Neil Armstrong and Yuri Gagarin the two greats from spaceflight and space exploration. Back to earth all these companies have been exploring the chemical space for drug discovery doing great work!
In a new paper in Nature Biotechnology (A small-molecule TNIK inhibitor targets fibrosis in preclinical and clinical models), Insilico Medicine describes step-by-step the process that undertook to develop INS018_055, a small-molecule TNIK inhibitor that is currently in phase 2 trials for the treatment of the lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. That includes how Insilico used its proprietary AI platform, PandaOmics, to both identify a target and come up with a drug candidate to treat the disease.
Moreover, they presented their first demo of Precious3GPT, a
multimodal,
multi-omics (proteomes, RNA sequencing and DNA methylation data),
multi-species,
multi-tissue, and
multi-tasking
transformer for drug discovery and aging research ("biology in time"). They trained one model on multiple data types tokenized separately to perform many tasks and the work was done by Insilico’s team in the Middle East. Thanks to a ChatGPT-compatible API, Precious3GPT may be integrated into custom AI-based workflows to support complex research pipelines. For more: Precious3GPT.
Shifting from academia to industry? A guide by
Unlearning bad habits from academia ✂️
Vega Shah, PhD is the Senior Manager, Research Product Strategy at Benchling. The world’s most innovative biotech companies use Benchling’s R&D Cloud to power the development of breakthrough products and accelerate time to milestone and market.
Atomic Tessellator ⚗️🖥️
Atomic Tessellator (New Zealand, 2022) is a modern computational chemistry company accelerated by AI. At Atomic Tessellator they are applying the latest in DL to materials science. They are an ab initio, in silico company, focused on Thermodynamics, Molecular Mechanics, Kinematics, Catalysis, Surface Chemistry and Reaction Pathways. The founder is Alain Richardt and the company offers:
AI Catalyst Discovery Lab (search, refine, verify): an AI assisted similarity search for desirable catalytic activity profile, uploading your own slabs or query their database of 10s of thousands. And extend successful simulations to act as seeds for more refined searches and automatically filter based on reactivity, selectivity, surface stability and many more.
GPU visualization tools: Charge density grids scaling to millions of voxels, Isosurfaces in real time. Animated charge flow and support for uploading your own cubefiles.
Generative AI - Retrosynthetic Pathways
Fork simulations, and
Process Simulation (Interoperable, Refine): Changeable compute backends for different reaction network discovery. Viewing results on-platform or download with the API. Extracting candidate adsorbates for downstream analysis and gas phase, liquid phase and surface phase simulations, with support for multiple reaction vessels.
A tessellation or tiling is the covering of a surface, often a plane, using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps.
In mathematics, tessellation can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries.
In computer graphics, tessellation is the dividing of datasets of polygons (sometimes called vertex sets) presenting objects in a scene into suitable structures for rendering. Especially for real-time rendering, data is tessellated into triangles, for example in OpenGL 4.0 and Direct3D 11.
In biological systems, the tessellation of cells within tissues is strongly linked to the evolution of multicellularity. In multicellular organisms, sophisticated functions emerge from the coordinated interactions of specialized cells organized in specific architectures and patterns. In the paper “Controlled packing and single-droplet resolution of 3D-printed functional synthetic tissues” in Nature Communications the authors explore the driving forces that dictate the regular tessellation of cell-like compartments in synthetic tissue mimics generated by 3D-printing.
⚠️ Hallucinations in Large Language Models are inevitable.
(As a matter of fact, even our best scientists or politicians hallucinate from time to time. 🧟)
To learn more about LLMs follow
and subscribe to Artificial Intelligence Made Simple.“The essence of math is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.”
By Stan Gudder
Until next time 🐞
Thanks for including me!